AI-Powered Meeting Notes

Delivered October 28, 2019. Contributor: Megan B.

Goals

To find platforms similar to Otter.ai.

Early Findings

Otter.ai offers AI-powered transcription of any uploaded video or audio. This can produce notes for presentations, meetings, interviews, etc. It allows for searching, editing, playing, sharing and organizing. It also offers live notes. It natively integrates with Zoom.

Quite a few of the platforms similar to Otter focus only on calls, such as Tetra and Clark. Whipnote is designed for live conference calls and uses AI to actually coach individuals during the call. Reason8 seems similar, but details about the actual functionality are sketchy. It appears to only work with live meetings/recordings.

Steno offers live and uploaded recording transcription. While not as advanced as Otter.ai, it does allow for searching, marking and sharing. Users can then upload their content to various connected cloud services.

Voicera, now called Voicea, focuses more on voice collaboration. The platform transcribes in-person, phone and video conference meetings.

Trint, another startup, offers similar features to Otter. Users can upload video and audio for AI-powered transcription. The transcripts can then be edited (and searched) for export to various cloud services. It does offer some in-platform sharing/collaboration capabilities, but not to the advanced level of Otter.

Sonix.ai is also a similar automated transcription service. Again, the workspace capabilities are less, but it offers robust, fast transcription. Files can then be exported or stored in external cloud systems.

Verbit.ai is also similar. It offers transcription and video captioning. Users can manage the files end-to-end and control access and editing. It also offers live transcription.

Simon Says is also often cited in articles with Otter and Trint, but exact details about the product's features are extremely vague.

Proposed next steps:

You need to be the project owner to select a next step.

Our initial research found several possible candidates to compare with Otter, though none seem to have the depth of workspace capabilities as Otter. We propose using these Early Findings to investigate to most likely candidates more deeply (Trint, Sonix, Verbit, Simon Says, Reason8 and any others we find during our research) to select the 3-4 closest to Otter. Then, for each company, we will list their key features and pricing.

Alternatively, we could find 3-4 platforms offering a form of AI-powered transcription but with less features than Otter. These platforms would likely be much cheaper in pricing. Not repeating any of the companies from Proposed Next Step#1, we could look for more basic AI transcription platforms than simply transcribe uploaded audio (and video, if possible) to then allow export to workplace collaboration platforms. These platforms would be different in that they would be highly rated yet simple in their features and offerings (in contract to software like Otter, which is more of an end-to-end solution for transcription, storage AND collaboration). For each, we would discuss their features, integration or sharing capabilities and pricing.